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Introduction

Writers on Liszt are unanimous in their verdict upon the Sonata in B minor: it is Liszt’s greatest piano work, if not indeed his finest composition. It is also one of the few important Liszt works to be ostensibly free of any kind of programme or external reference, although, as Alfred Brendel and others have contended, a case can be made out for relating the structure and content of the piece to Goethe’s Faust. (If, as seems more likely, the piece is autobiographical or self-revelatory, the connection with Faust may still be drawn.) And Brendel is surely right to reject the notion, based on the use of the so-called ‘Cross-motif’ – three notes rising by a tone and a minor third, the first three notes of the plainsong Vexilla regis prodeunt – in the Grandioso second subject, that there is a religious dimension to the work. For a general analysis of the piece of not too technical a nature, Brendel’s essay in Music Sounded Out is strongly commended. Here, a few brief observations must suffice.

Without entering into the many different interpretations by critical commentators upon the broad structure of the work, we may content ourselves that the piece is in a single, unbroken movement, containing a slow central section and a scherzo-like fugato which, viewing the work as a large first-movement form, more or less play the part of the Classical development section as well as give the impression of several movements in one. Liszt was, of course, influenced by Schubert’s ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy in the shape of the piece, but strove to create more of a single dramatic design. He had, by this time, already written two large-scale piano works in which he attempted to fuse elements of two movements into one: the Grosses Konzertsolo and the Scherzo and March, but, excellent as those attempts are, it is only in the Sonata where the aim is triumphantly achieved. Liszt worked very long and carefully at this project, and we may be thankful that he never risked invidious comparison by ever composing a second piano work of these dimensions. The Sonata remains the most important and original contribution to the form since Beethoven and Schubert.

Like the Faust Symphony and many other larger Liszt works, the tonality of the piece is withheld at the beginning, and the first theme, Lento assai, rhythmically ambiguous octaves separated by silence and followed by a descending scale, is in a kind of G minor. B minor is immediately established at the tempo change to Allegro energico in the eighth bar. Two further themes are introduced in quick succesion – a theme in octaves characterized by the downward interval of the diminished seventh, and a rhythmic motif in the bass easily identified by its repeated notes. Themes two and three inform the ensuing pages until the opening theme returns to herald the fourth theme, Grandioso, which takes the music to D major and, in Classical terms, the second subject, which continues by thematic transformation of the earlier material in the new key. Especially beautiful is the delicate melody derived from the third theme, its repeated notes no longer menacing. Frenetic development leads to a passage (from bar 255) which corresponds to the Classical codetta and (at bar 277) the development which opens with a transformation of the very opening of the work. An almost operatic dialogue leads to the Andante sostenuto in F sharp major with its new, fifth theme, which alternates with the fourth to create the most passionate of slow movements. A return to the opening material introduces the fugato in the principal fast tempo, full of wit and spiky dissonance, before the recapitulation (from bar 531) which builds to a great climax (from the Più mosso at bar 555) before the second subject matter returns in B major. (It is interesting to note that this melody is much more restrained than it was in its D major appearance, and that, despite the wilful tinkering by many a pianist, Liszt does not specify the addition of the bottom octave B here, or indeed anywhere else in the whole Sonata until the very last note. Of all Liszt’s music, this is surely the piece which requires the most absolute fidelity to the text.)

The Stretta Presto and Prestissimo of the treacherous octaves in the coda do not lead to a grand conclusion (although the manuscript shows that Liszt briefly entertained the idea) but to a masterly bringing to rest of all the material, including the theme of the slow movement in a mood of quiet optimism achieved by the most oblique final cadence, from the F major triad to the gently reiterated chord of B major, in its aspiring second inversion until the last note finally releases all tension.

As is very well known, Liszt dedicated his Sonata to Schumann in a reciprocal gesture for receiving the dedication of Schumann’s great Fantasy, Op 17 – a dedication which Clara Schumann spitefully expunged in her edition of her late husband’s works!

Recordings

'Virtuosity of a kind to which few other pianists could pretend' (Gramophone)'A keenly dramatic and powerfully projected account that has the listener on the edge of his or her seat. It must be numbered among the finest perform ...» More

Leslie Howard’s recordings of Liszt’s complete piano music, on 99 CDs, is one of the monumental achievements in the history of recorded music. Remarkable as much for its musicological research and scholarly rigour as for Howard’s Herculean piano p ...» More

The Liszt Sonata is undoubtedly one of the peaks of the repertoire, and recordings are suitably copious, but when an artist of Hamelin’s virtuoso pedigree wishes to tackle it no excuse need be made for an additional version. This is a major Liszt ...» More

One of the pinnacles of the repertoire and a long-held ambition: Angela Hewitt’s performance of the Liszt Sonata is a revelation. Also recorded are the Dante Sonata and the three Petrarch Sonnets.» More

'At last, Hough tackles Liszt’s Sonata on record and the result is as musicianly as this fine pianist’s admirers might expect' (Gramophone)'Hough transforms the rumbling, chromatic bass line [Ballade No 2] into an almost terrifyingly atmospheric setting' (BBC Music Magazine)» More

Details

The B minor Piano Sonata is generally accepted to be Liszt’s greatest work for the piano, and one of the most important contributions to the post-Beethovenian piano sonata. Alan Walker believes that ‘if Liszt had written nothing else, he would have to be ranked as a master on the strength of this work alone’. Although sketches for extracts of the Sonata date from some years earlier, the piece was fully worked out in a relatively concentrated span in late 1852 and early 1853 (the manuscript was finished, according to Liszt’s inscription, on 2 February 1853). Liszt dedicated it to Robert Schumann, a reciprocal gesture for Schumann’s dedication to Liszt of his C major Fantasy in 1839.

The Sonata is built on a small number of pregnant thematic cells, which—elaborated, transformed and variously juxtaposed—underpin both the foreground melodic shapes and the background structural organization. The first thematic tag—the tonally ambiguous, modally inflected descending scales that open the Sonata—acts as a dramatic structural signpost, equivalent to a curtain between the acts of a play. Two other principal ideas are also presented on the opening page, the first a leaping octave declamation (‘Allegro energico’), the second a Mephistophelean gesture characterized by its repeated notes. The way Liszt develops and combines these ideas lies at the heart of the work’s power and cohesion: the dramatic recontextualizations of the basic thematic material, enabled by Liszt’s unparalleled feeling for instrumental texture and his unprecedented elevation of pianistic sonority to a level of structural operation, are the lifeblood of the Sonata. Liszt’s genius for creating musical character, and his emphasis on varying and contrasting his characterization through a process of thematic metamorphosis, forced him to create new formal structures to accommodate his musical arguments. ‘New wine demands new bottles’ was Liszt’s phrase, yet he has possibly received more credit for the bottles than for the wine. Of course Liszt’s formal innovations are important, but his most lasting influence stems from his renewal of the musical language.

After a long transitional passage and a more agitated statement of the opening descending scale, we reach a grandioso theme that fulfils the function of the second subject in the relative major key of D. Here Liszt introduces a three-note motif (rising a tone, then a minor third) that is the same as the first three notes of the plainsong ‘Vexilla Regis prodeunt’. This idea is known as Liszt’s ‘Cross-motif’, and it can also be found in some of his religious works, including the oratorio The Legend of St Elisabeth, the ‘Gran’ Mass and Via Crucis. Although many performers reject the notion, it has been suggested that the presence of this motif adds a religious dimension to the Sonata, and this is only the beginning of the multifarious attempts to pin extra-musical associations to the work. The most prevalent is that Liszt intended a musical depiction of Goethe’s Faust, with distinct themes for Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles—this view was, according to Liszt’s grand-pupil Claudio Arrau, taken for granted by Liszt’s pupils. But, unusually for a composer who otherwise shunned purely generic titles, and who believed that revealing the extra-musical source of inspiration gave a deeper insight into the intended spirit of the work, Liszt said nothing about the B minor Sonata, and the work is surely the more profound for the variety of interpretative viewpoints it sustains.

Part of the Sonata’s fascination is the way it unfolds two layers of structure simultaneously. As with Schubert’s ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy (a work Liszt knew well, having arranged it for piano and orchestra in 1851), Liszt alludes to a traditional four-movement structure within the Sonata’s single extended movement. The ‘Andante sostenuto’ and ‘Quasi Adagio’ fulfil the dual role of slow movement and development section, and the following fugato acts as a scherzo third movement and a continuing development (contrapuntal intensification being a common developmental procedure), which moves seamlessly into the recapitulation / finale at the return to B minor (bars 533). After the hugely virtuosic ‘Prestissimo’ climax, and a shattering pause, follows one of the most sublime passages in the entire piano literature. Liszt had notorious difficulty finding effective endings for some of his most flamboyant works (those to the Don Juan and Norma paraphrases, for example, are strikingly anti-climactic), and he originally wrote a loud conclusion to the Sonata; the quiet, benediction-like epilogue, reuniting the main themes in a wonderfully fulfilling manner, was an inspired afterthought.

On 31 May 1861 Franz Liszt received some unexpected but welcome news from France. In prose that itself almost beamed with delight, he wrote to his partner Princess Wittgenstein to say that he had been elevated to the rank of Commandeur de la Légion d’honneur by the Emperor Napoléon III—an honour granted to very few musicians. But what pleased Liszt most of all was ironically not the award itself, but the fact that the official citation had described him simply as a composer, with no mention at all of his fame as a pianist. Some caustic Parisian gossip nevertheless claimed that it was only Liszt’s touching performance of Chopin’s Funeral March to the recently bereaved Empress Eugénie that had won him this new status, and not his allegedly incomprehensible compositions; but for Liszt, the citation genuinely seemed like a long-awaited vindication.

It was certainly true that a decade or so earlier ‘composer’ would hardly have been the first term that came to mind when Liszt was mentioned. ‘Pianist’ might have been the most popular choice, although some less charitable individuals may have come up with ‘tireless self-publicist’, or even ‘celebrated philanderer’. Liszt’s transformation into a composer first and foremost had, in fact, only taken place in the years from 1848, when he withdrew from the hectic life of a touring virtuoso and settled down as Kapellmeister in the small town of Weimar. There he intended to create a body of original compositions worthy of his talent. It was, in fact, high time. He was already in his late thirties, and had previously been pigeonholed merely as a pianist of genius who persisted—against all published evidence—in the harmless but bizarre delusion that he was also a great composer.

Even an admired colleague like Robert Schumann was largely of the same opinion, pointedly writing in a review of Liszt’s Grandes Études that the author’s development as a creative artist lagged sadly behind his talents as a performer. And Liszt, in private, was forced to agree. When Schumann dedicated his wonderful Op 17 Fantasy to Liszt in 1839, the latter felt keenly that he had nothing of similar quality to offer in return. Reciprocal requirements were partly fulfilled by the dedication of Liszt’s Paganini Studies to Schumann’s beloved Clara Wieck, but it was not until 1854, when he published his magnificent Sonata in B minor, that Liszt finally felt confident of having composed a piano piece to match Schumann’s Fantasy. It was, by then, too late. Robert Schumann was languishing in an asylum in Endenich, and never heard the great music dedicated to him. It was left only to Clara to record a personal reaction to Liszt’s Sonata: ‘truly terrible’. ‘And now’, she lamented, ‘I’m even expected to thank him for it!’

Clara’s comments turned out to represent the dissenting opinion on Liszt’s Sonata, which is now accepted as one of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century music. Justly proud of his achievement, Liszt would frequently perform it for visitors in Weimar (one of whom was the young Brahms, who promptly nodded off—he was of a mind with Clara here), along with some other works that represented his music at its most inspired. Several of these are collected on the present disc. Even though Liszt certainly knew every note by heart, he would ostentatiously play from the published scores, to demonstrate that these were properly ‘composed’ pieces, not simply elaborate improvisations. Indeed, his student William Mason claimed that the scores of both the Sonata and Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude lying on Liszt’s piano were soon falling apart, so often had they been pressed into service. But the scores were, for Liszt, more than just performing material—they were evidence of his new success as a creative artist.

We search in vain for any personal programme for the Piano Sonata in B minor. But this annoying omission on the part of the composer has been generously rectified by numerous critics, who have mostly seen in the piece another commentary on Goethe’s Faust—a pianistic double, therefore, of Liszt’s Faust Symphony. Other suggested interpretations include the autobiographical (the Sonata in some sense a ‘character sketch’ of the composer himself) and the eschatological (a musical version of Milton’s Paradise Lost). Liszt would have had no justification for complaining about these invented programmes, for he himself advanced similarly fantastic conjectures for Chopin’s music; but the fact remains that neither the composer, nor the pupils who studied the Sonata with him, ever mentioned a programme in connection with the piece, which was the culmination of many years of experimentation with sonata form, and an attempt to follow in the footsteps of Beethoven in this most prestigious of genres.

The Sonata in B minor unfolds in only one vast movement, but within this Liszt encapsulates elements of the more common three- or four-movement sonata form. The idea of fusing elements of several movements into one was partly inspired by Beethoven’s example in the last movement of his Ninth Symphony, but Schubert had also adopted a similar plan for his 1822 Wanderer-Fantasy, one of Liszt’s favourite concert pieces. Many piano fantasias, for example Beethoven’s Op 77 and Hummel’s Op 18, or even Kalkbrenner’s slightly dilapidated Effusio musica, are similarly composed of relatively short, contrasting sections in a variety of keys and tempos. Schubert, however, follows a more complex plan, using thematic transformation to link sections together in a scheme of exposition section, slow section (the tune from his song Der Wanderer), scherzo and finale (the last beginning with a fugal exposition). Liszt succeeded in the B minor Sonata in adapting Schubert’s approach to the balanced tonal structure of a sonata form.

The idea that an important piece could consist of one movement alone, rather than three or four, seemed to have particular appeal to Liszt. In a review written in 1837 of some of Schumann’s piano music, and discussing in particular the sonata Schumann had entitled ‘Concert sans orchestre’, Liszt mused over the history of concerto form. Previously a concerto had to have three movements, he claimed. On the other hand, Field in his Piano Concerto No 7 had replaced the second solo section of the first movement with an Adagio. Weber, Mendelssohn and even Herz had also proceeded along this path. Liszt believed that the future lay in the free treatment of traditional form. Or, as he later put it, good composition involved the construction of ‘forms, not formulae’.

Although there were several precedents for concertos and fantasias in one continuous movement, there were few for the piano sonata, apart from Moscheles’s Sonate mélancolique, Op 49, which otherwise unfolds in standard sonata form. The marriage of the fantasy, which was normally in one movement, with the traditional multi-movement sonata had again been foreshadowed by Beethoven in his two sonatas ‘quasi una fantasia’ Op 27. These sonatas were to be played without a break between movements. Op 27 No 1 is especially notable in this regard in that the movements themselves are not independent. (Op 27 No 2 is of course the famous ‘Moonlight’ Sonata.) Liszt performed both Op 27 sonatas frequently, the latter perhaps too frequently, and neatly inverted their subtitle for the final version of Après une lecture du Dante, which he described as ‘fantasia quasi sonata’.

The exposition and recapitulation of Liszt’s Sonata can be considered as analogous to the first movement and finale of a four-movement sonata, while the slow section and fugal scherzo that take up most of the development supply the other two hypothetical movements. Although a fondness for fluid chromatic harmony is everywhere in evidence here, the basic key relationships are deliberately more conventional than are usual with Liszt—the second subject is in the traditional relative major, while the slow section is in the dominant. This conventional outline points up all the more starkly the originality of the off-key opening (first in the Phrygian mode, then in a ‘gypsy-scale’ G minor), which seems at first to be the beginning of a piece in C minor rather than B minor. Even the scherzo section gives the initial impression of being a recapitulation in the wrong key—a semitone too low—before the music is violently wrenched back into the tonic key for the ‘proper’ return of the opening material.

Following this, Liszt’s original ending for the Sonata consisted of brashly histrionic chords carousing loudly up and down the keyboard, but he soon had a better idea. His second thoughts were the wonderful coda that now stands in the score—an ethereal conclusion bringing the work full circle to its opening theme, at last played in the tonic key, followed by three mystic harmonies in the high treble. Here Liszt used his virtuoso’s insight into the capabilities of the piano not to dazzle, but to create music of the highest spiritual quality.

The sonata’s thirty minutes are presented in a single musical span. There are no separate movements as such, but there are definite structural markers. Liszt starts with repeated, syncopated unison Gs, marked sotto voce and Lento assai. But are they to be short and dry, or slightly hazy? I have always done the latter, and am happy at the time of writing these notes to read in Kenneth Hamilton’s excellent book After the Golden Age that the tradition of playing them like pizzicati actually comes from d’Albert, who never studied the piece with Liszt and never heard anyone play it who did. Liszt himself, evidently, wanted them to sound like ‘muffled timpani’. No matter which way you interpret them, the effect has to be mysterious. Then come two descending scales, one in Phrygian mode, the other a typical gypsy scale. It’s not hard to imagine these as scales on organ pedals (I know of one organist who has transcribed the whole sonata for this instrument). A few more repeated Gs and then we’re off!

The appearance of the second (and main) theme in this Allegro energico (0'50''), rapidly emerging out of the preceding sotto voce, is only marked forte. The key is not yet established, but the defiant mood is. An insistent repeated motif in the bass (1'01'') is the third musical subject in just fifteen bars. After a double pause, a build-up passage marked agitato brings us to the first fortissimo on an inverted E flat major chord using a fragment of that main theme. After another appearance of the hammering third subject in the bass, we finally find ourselves firmly in B minor (1'45''). Even what might be considered merely flashy virtuosic material (for instance the diminished seventh arpeggios) is taken from germs of the subjects already presented. Nothing is simply note spinning. A triumphant passage in octaves descends into the lower part of the keyboard, with those syncopated repeated notes and scales from the beginning of the piece now reappearing.

Liszt masterfully and thrillingly leads us into his next big theme, marked Grandioso and in D major (3'39''). A wonderful feeling of openness, generosity of spirit and the nobility that I’ve already mentioned bursts forth. It is all-encompassing, larger than life. The musical material is simple, and derived from the first subject.

All through this sonata Liszt uses the same musical motifs to produce different characters. That second, defiant subject now becomes a theme marked dolce con grazia (4'50''). That hammered third subject becomes quiet but menacing (5'39''). It then breaks forth in the top voice as a beautiful melody marked cantando espressivo (6'06''). Liszt the great singer at the keyboard is now centre stage.

The pace begins to quicken, almost imperceptibly at first. Tenderness gives way to insistence. A recitative-like passage underneath expressive trills in the right hand leads us into an extended bravura section, but again one in which every note means something and has its logical origins. One of my favourite passages in the whole sonata comes at 9'15''. The second subject, now flying high but without force, is encircled by scales and whirling arpeggios. A surprising harmonic change leads us into the next passage, marked incalzando (pressing on). The whirlwind gradually builds up momentum (how important it is not to get too loud or too fast too soon), taking us to written-out tremolos in the right hand with those descending scales of the opening helping to build up the tension (10'16''). An appearance of the second subject, back in its defiant mood and presented in octaves, is followed by an extended Recitativo passage, posing questions with its rising fourths in both hands.

The sonata’s thirty minutes are presented in a single musical span. There are no separate movements as such, but there are definite structural markers. Liszt starts with repeated, syncopated unison Gs, marked sotto voce and Lento assai. But are they to be short and dry, or slightly hazy? I have always done the latter, and am happy at the time of writing these notes to read in Kenneth Hamilton’s excellent book After the Golden Age that the tradition of playing them like pizzicati actually comes from d’Albert, who never studied the piece with Liszt and never heard anyone play it who did. Liszt himself, evidently, wanted them to sound like ‘muffled timpani’. No matter which way you interpret them, the effect has to be mysterious. Then come two descending scales, one in Phrygian mode, the other a typical gypsy scale. It’s not hard to imagine these as scales on organ pedals (I know of one organist who has transcribed the whole sonata for this instrument). A few more repeated Gs and then we’re off!

The appearance of the second (and main) theme in this Allegro energico (0'50''), rapidly emerging out of the preceding sotto voce, is only marked forte. The key is not yet established, but the defiant mood is. An insistent repeated motif in the bass (1'01'') is the third musical subject in just fifteen bars. After a double pause, a build-up passage marked agitato brings us to the first fortissimo on an inverted E flat major chord using a fragment of that main theme. After another appearance of the hammering third subject in the bass, we finally find ourselves firmly in B minor (1'45''). Even what might be considered merely flashy virtuosic material (for instance the diminished seventh arpeggios) is taken from germs of the subjects already presented. Nothing is simply note spinning. A triumphant passage in octaves descends into the lower part of the keyboard, with those syncopated repeated notes and scales from the beginning of the piece now reappearing.

Liszt masterfully and thrillingly leads us into his next big theme, marked Grandioso and in D major (3'39''). A wonderful feeling of openness, generosity of spirit and the nobility that I’ve already mentioned bursts forth. It is all-encompassing, larger than life. The musical material is simple, and derived from the first subject.

All through this sonata Liszt uses the same musical motifs to produce different characters. That second, defiant subject now becomes a theme marked dolce con grazia (4'50''). That hammered third subject becomes quiet but menacing (5'39''). It then breaks forth in the top voice as a beautiful melody marked cantando espressivo (6'06''). Liszt the great singer at the keyboard is now centre stage.

The pace begins to quicken, almost imperceptibly at first. Tenderness gives way to insistence. A recitative-like passage underneath expressive trills in the right hand leads us into an extended bravura section, but again one in which every note means something and has its logical origins. One of my favourite passages in the whole sonata comes at 9'15''. The second subject, now flying high but without force, is encircled by scales and whirling arpeggios. A surprising harmonic change leads us into the next passage, marked incalzando (pressing on). The whirlwind gradually builds up momentum (how important it is not to get too loud or too fast too soon), taking us to written-out tremolos in the right hand with those descending scales of the opening helping to build up the tension (10'16''). An appearance of the second subject, back in its defiant mood and presented in octaves, is followed by an extended Recitativo passage, posing questions with its rising fourths in both hands.

Another masterful link leads us into what functions as the ‘slow movement’. Marked Andante sostenuto, this is in the key of F sharp major which Liszt used for his ‘beatific’ music (as in the Dante Sonata). This was also Messiaen’s favourite key for expressing transcendence. Dolce and dolcissimo con intimo sentimento, writes Liszt. There is an almost unbearable poignancy and a reaching out to the unattainable in this most breathtaking of moments. The Grandioso subject reappears, but its strength, itching to break forth, is held back. A rhapsodic, gypsy-like cadenza interrupts its progress. Finally it can be contained no longer, and the ecstatic outpouring of feeling (3'43'') is truly magnificent. It is for me a mark of Liszt’s genius that he manages to continue this exalted feeling all through the calming passage that ends this ‘slow movement’, using already-heard material but in different guises. The tension is not broken for a second.

Those descending scales heard at the beginning of the sonata reappear at crucial points in the work’s architecture. Now, marked ppp and with a feeling of exhaustion, they lead us into the next ‘movement’. The octave leaps that herald the second theme spring forth as the subject of a three-part fugato in B flat minor (the ‘wrong’ key for a recapitulation), diabolic and mischievous in nature, even if marked sotto voce. The third, hammering subject is back as well. It begins to take over, rising beneath desperate-sounding fragments of the second subject. Throughout this work Liszt uses Beethoven’s technique of shortening motifs to great effect. The passage at 1'14'', beginning in B flat major, could be heard as empty virtuoso noise, but nothing could be further from the truth. It has that second subject presented in both hands simultaneously in contrary motion, one in octaves, one in repeated chords.

The return to B minor is one of the most thrilling moments in the entire work. But the excitement isn’t over yet. Liszt interrupts this recapitulation with those syncopated notes and scales again (0'38''). A low F sharp pedal-point gives the basis for a stringendo leading to an outburst of octaves and the biggest hammering of all of the third subject. Here’s a place (1'37'') where everything happens in the rests. The anger or despair—or whatever you want to call it—dissolves in the silences between the notes before the third ‘hammering’ into an even more moving presentation of the Grandioso theme, this time in B major (1'50'').

The next few pages present material from the exposition, but now centered in B major. The coda, marked Presto (5'00''), contains a famous octave passage used to measure the virtuosity of the performer. But even this is thematically derived. A final fortissimo climax ends in a dramatic pause on a dominant seventh chord.

Then what? It is often said that Liszt first planned a crash-bang-wallop ending to this piece, but then changed his mind. Indeed the manuscript (which was also a working copy and rather messy) contains such a passage crossed out in red ink. Leslie Howard argues that this was never going to be the end of the piece, and that the quiet ending as we know it was always planned. All I can say is thank goodness for that! Now that we know this piece so well, it is easy to see that those opening scales simply had to return at the end—a bit like in Bach’s Goldberg Variations when the Aria is repeated after our long voyage, but transformed in mood because of where we have been. After a look back at the Andante sostenuto that formed the ‘slow movement’, the darkness of B minor returns with the third subject now projecting a bleakness and a sense of loss that seems final (1'17''). But it isn’t. After those scales, now almost inaudible, a progression of chords (A minor, F major—with a crescendo on the latter that must be felt even though on the piano it can’t be done) ends on an inversion of B major, repeated three times, and disappearing into eternity. The final low B of the ‘muffled timpani’ ends this unique work. Light and peace have triumphed.

Liszt’s most consummate work for piano – a unique study in thematic transformation, an essay of complex structural organization, of wondrous tonal insights and enigmatic harmonic manifestations, of molten no less than fragile keyboard layout – the Piano Sonata in B minor (1851–1853) was first performed in public in Berlin by Hans von Bülow (Liszt’s pupil and son-in-law) at a concert given on 22 January 1857 to inaugurate the first grand piano to be made by Carl Bechstein. ‘An unexpected, almost unanimous success … completely [dumbfounding] the cretinous scoundrels’, was Bülow’s verdict to the composer. Liszt dedicated it to Schumann.

Architecturally, after the model of Schubert’s motto-cyclic ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy, a favourite work of Liszt’s, the whole (like the Grosses Konzertsolo of around 1849) is cast in the form of a single polymorphous movement divided into sections. The particular function and chemistry of these sections has been analytically interpreted in many ways; the present writer’s ‘Wanderer’-derived blueprint places emphasis on a four-movement-within-one ground plan, framed by a ‘Prologue’ and ‘Epilogue’:

Tonally, Liszt explores tensions at once Classical, Romantic and futuristic. He is at his most Classical in the ‘exposition’ and ‘recapitulation’, with first and second subject groups initially in the tonic (B minor) and relative major (D), and latterly in tonic minor and major. Likewise, his ‘Andante sostenuto — Quasi Adagio’ (on a theme sketched in a notebook of 1849) is broadly in F sharp, the dominant. However, how he travels between and contextualizes these keys shows him in essentially Romantic light: for instance, in the ‘exposition’, the ‘flat’ orientation of the transition between the B minor agitato of the ‘Allegro energico’ (a combination of the second and third themes of the work) and both the D major ‘Grandioso’ idea (the ‘ardent virtuoso, head thrown back’ tune of Walter Beckett’s biography, 1956) and the ‘Cantando espressivo’; the ‘flat’ A major and ‘sharp’ G minor operatic interpolations of the ‘slow movement’; the B flat minor key of the ‘Scherzo-fugato’ (a section whose duple time signature and short staccato seem to remember the Beethoven of Op 31 No 3); and the heroic, volcanic importance of E flat major.

Programmatically, Liszt provides us with no clues as to the character or meaning of his themes. As Searle confirms, ‘the B minor Sonata … does not attempt to tell a story’. However, from the evidence of his students (who, according to his grand-pupil Claudio Arrau, took the fact for granted), the example of Alkan’s earlier Quasi-Faust published in Paris in 1847 (with which the B minor shares – to the point of even occasional plagiarism – strong melodic, structural and conceptual ties, including a fugue), and the thematic/descriptive proof of his own later Faust Symphony, we may assume them to have general associations with the Faust, Mephistopheles and Gretchen story of Goethe’s drama, all traceable in one guise or another. In Arrau’s view, ‘I think of the Sonata as a great Faustian tone-poem, with Gretchen, Faust and Mephistopheles all playing out their archetypal roles of transcendence, redemption and negation’. Brendel, while admitting it does not need a programme, also likens its macrocosm to a ‘Faust-Mephisto-Gretchen constellation’.

In her book on Liszt (1974), Eleanor Perényi calls the B minor Sonata ‘a kind of cosmic self-portrait’. It ‘recasts the familiar sonata form’, she says, ‘into a single unit in which the motifs are twisted, unwound, rewoven like a serpent’s coils. It moves like some extraordinary, iridescent object through space, now grandiose, now threatening, now heavenly, until it explodes into one of the great climaxes in piano literature, dying away to an exquisite epilogue. In Liszt’s hands, it must have been miraculous.’

Brahms, like Clara Schumann, failed to appreciate it. Hanslick ravaged it (‘this musical monstrosity’). Sitwell could find no enthusiasm. But Wagner celebrated, joyously: a work ‘beautiful beyond all conception; great, lovely, deep and noble, sublime even as thyself. I feel most profoundly moved …’ (London, 5 April 1855).